Premiere: Watch the video for local noise musician Jeff Carey’s ‘EXT’

For his fourth album, “Zero Player Game,” local noise musician Jeff Carey used custom software and manipulated it with a joystick and video game controller to “an intensely artificial sound world where beats and bass lines are replaced with an elastic structure of synthetic texture, feedback and bit crushed noise blasts,” per a release.

On “EXT,” it sounds like a scrambled television or computer that bleats, screeches and plinks its way to life, giving way to long, eerie droning sounds. The video, making its debut here, uses aerial footage captured by the FBI–and later released via the public information act–during the Baltimore Uprising. At times, the black-and-white images are comprehensible–the Arch Social Club at Penn-North, a line of human protesters, the dome of City Hall–but during other points, when it sounds like the program is going particularly haywire, the screen resembles a sloshing abstraction.

By the end, though, the images of protesters and law enforcement gathering at the site of protests following Freddie Gray’s death are crystal clear, leaving an uneasy feeling about the security state as the camera hovers over the crowd with a set of crosshairs in the center.

Martin Schmidt of the group Matmos fittingly described Carey’s music as “like being beaten up by alien cops.” Watch the video for “EXT” here:

Brandon Weigel is the managing editor of Baltimore Fishbowl. A graduate of the University of Maryland, he has been published in The Washington Post, The Sun, Baltimore Magazine, Urbanite, The Baltimore Business Journal, b and others. Prior to joining Baltimore Fishbowl, he was an editor at City Paper from 2012 to 2017. He can be reached at [email protected]